Our ancient ancestors painted their stories on cave walls, carved them into tablets and wrote them on papyrus. Some of this information has been passed down to us, but a great deal of it has been lost.

Today, in the information age, we churn out incredible volumes of data to add to what is left to us from the history. Unfortunately, if something were to go wrong our descendants would inherit almost nothing from us. Without proper maintenance, in 50 years everything stored on a hard drive, flash drive or server would be lost.

Fortunately, researchers now think that they have a mechanism that will allow them to store vast amounts of data almost indefinitely and, like the cave walls, it is found in nature.

Nothing found to date can hold as much information in as little space as DNA. In 2012 researchers at Harvard managed to cram 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA. The technology however has not allowed for error free retrieval.

Now researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) believe that they have solved the problem. Led by Robert Grass, a lecturer at ETH Zurich’s Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences they have shown that by encapsulating the DNA in silica and using an algorithm to correct for errors, information can be preserved safely for a million years.

Previous attempts at DNA storage have resulted in errors after just a short amount of time. The problem is that as DNA can change significantly as it reacts chemically with the environment.

However, fossilized material found in bones can still be analyzed after hundreds of thousands of years because it has been protected from interaction with the environment.

“Similar to these bones, we wanted to protect the information-bearing DNA with a synthetic ‘fossil’ shell,” said Grass in a statement.

To do that the researchers encapsulated the DNA in silica (glass) spheres approximately 150 nanometers in diameter.

In order to test the method, they stored the capsules at temperatures between 150 and 175 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 70 Celsius) for up to a month. According to the researchers the high temperatures replicate the chemical degradation that normally takes place over hundreds of years in a few weeks.

The DNA in the glass capsule, when separated using a floured solution, turned out to be completely intact when information was read from it.

However, data stored in this manner for a million years cannot be expected to be error free. In order to respond to anticipated issues, Reinhard Heckel from ETH Zurich’s Communication Technology Laboratory developed an error chorrection scheme based on the Reed-Solomon Codes.

Similar codes are currently used for the transmission of information over great distances, such as radio communication with distant spacecraft.

The key, explained Heckel, is to add additional data to the actual data. “In order to define a parabola, you basically need only three points. We added a further two in case one gets lost or is shifted,” he said.

When asked what kind of information he’d like to preserve for a million years, Grass said that he’d store the documents in Unesco’s Memory of the World Programme and Wikipedia.

“Many entries are described in detail, others less so. This probably provides a good overview of what our society knows, what occupies it and to what extent,” said Grass.